Look up Amazon Aurora.

They've basically created new a DBMS that runs on top of their cloud infrastructure and is optimized for their EBS (elastic block storage). They have Postgres and MySQL flavors of the database, both of which utilize the actual DB "engines", Amazon has written their own storage backends and added a bunch of other optimizations to the codebase (they've made most messaging asynchronous where possible). Because of the use of the actual database engines they claim 100% compatibility for both Postgres and MySQL. We use the MySQL flavor and haven't run into any compatibility issues with SQL queries or stored procs. Because of the performance optimizations inherent in how it was designed to run in their cloud, we were able to significantly reduce the amount of CPU/RAM utilized to run our application and still retain similar throughput - in essence, we were able to use a smaller RDS instance size, thus reducing our costs.

One of the really nice things about it is virtually instant (and faultless) replication due to the way they rely on EBS itself to replicate data, rather than through a replication system sending queries (or binary data) to another remote system.

I only tangentially use node for development work, but once I saw people on message boards tossing around sudo commands to install stuff I immediately looked up how to avoid that. The solution is here: https://github.com/creationix/....

Basically, it installs node and all node executables into an .nvm directory in your home dir and then modifies your path to point to those distinct version. It also allows you to utilize multiple different node versions across different projects through the use of project specific .nvmrc files.

Using nvm would have avoided this bug, assuming you run as a non-privileged user...you do, right?

APPLE just announced they are hiring 200k employees over the next five years and spending tens of billions more in the US, since they can finally bring money back from overseas

http://www.foxbusiness.com/fea...

You're an order of magnitude off on that 200K figure...it's 20K jobs. Nothing to scoff at, but also not 200K new jobs.

Also from the article, "most of the $350 billion reflects money that Apple planned to spend with its suppliers and manufacturers in the U.S. anyway, even if corporate taxes had remained at the old 35 percent rate." ...and...

"After plowing nearly $46 billion into dividends and stock repurchases in its last fiscal year, Apple is likely to funnel a big chunk of overseas money to its shareholders."

Translation...most of the repatriated money was already earmarked for spending and that which wasn't is going to fatten stockholders wallets.

Because you use Google's G Suite for work and pay them to be your email provider.

Email is not absurdly cheap when you have to provide your own hosting hardware, make sure it stays online w/ 5+ 9's availability and provide near infinite inbox sizes. For $10/month/user you get all that from Google...plus access to their other apps (Drive, Docs, Sheets, etc).

G Suite Business accounts are not data-mined.

https://support.google.com/goo...

Not sure how it works by you, but by us (Cook County, IL) there's a fleet of property tax lawyers you pay $50 to to get your property taxes appealed and lowered. They handle the paperwork to file the appeal and then they take the first year's savings. You pretty much always get a lower appraisal and rate. You repeat this process every 3 years when the tax appraisals are redone.

It's a total racket, the appraisals are arbitrarily high specifically to account for this. My house's appraisal went up 30% this year. The appraisal is based on external square footage and nearby comps, and while I know the market has gone up since we bought a couple years ago, it hasn't gone up anywhere near that much.

You forgot......Silcon Valley, Veep, Last Week Tonight, The Night Of, Vice Principals, Band of Brothers, Pacific, Boardwalk Empire, Eastbound and Down, Flight of the Concords, The Jinx, The Larry Sanders Show, Mr. Show, Oz, True Detective (Season 1), The Wire. and I'm sure there's more I'm missing.

All of these shows/mini-series are fantastic...most of the movies they play are filler.

I like a lot of Netflix's offerings, but the quality of content HBO consistently puts out is on another level.

You joke about knockoff versions, but I've been watching Schitt's Creek lately and there's a character named Alexis on the show and my Echo Dot wakes probably twice an episode due to hearing someone say Alexis (usually it's when Catherine O'Hara yells it). Every once in a while, it'll respond with something random, usually though it just says "Sorry, I couldn't understand what you are asking."

At least it's probably cheaper than the 120K EUR squirrel bridge near The Hague and will get used more than 5 times:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

The 4chan claim about making up the dossier is utter bullshit.

http://gizmodo.com/4chan-idiot...

The downside of this is that at a big company, you're likely to work the single role you were hired for and not much else. You're just the junior QA guy or the just the junior front end dev, etc. Unless you enrich your learning on your own time, you're can possibly get stuck siloing yourself off from a lot of career paths.

At a small company, you WILL out of sheer lack of numbers to fill every job responsibility have to fill a ton of different roles - application support, development, infrustructure, QA, desktop support, project managment/planning, analyst.

This scares some people and others (like me) enjoy the fact that even though I'm primarily a software developer that if our Oracle database for an application I have next to nothing to do with starts randomly puking that my boss is going to get me and the other couple senior guys who work for the company on the phone to brainstorm what to do to get it back online. Or if our primary desktop support guy is out, I may have to handle some tickets and help someone figure out why some random spreadsheet from a client won't open in Excel.

I'd agree, if it was me, but my son (6) spent his own money on the game and is loving it. He's beaten every single level already (there's 24, I think) and is now trying to get every pink coin in the game - which is considerably harder. There is more complexity to the game than just jumping and it's not an endless runner Temple Run clone by any means. There's a lot of pattern recognition, timing and some problem solving needed to figure out how to get some of the coins.

He also loves being able to "play" against other people from around the world in Toad Rally and trying to beat them - you're playing against pre-recorded runs from others, not live ones.

I'm pretty sure that this game will see a lot of use for quite a while.

That's just plain disingenuous. They just released some nice code review stuff and projects support a couple months ago: https://github.com/blog/2272-i...

Here's their new feature postings: https://github.com/blog/catego...

They release something just about every couple weeks. It's not always huge, but they do iterate fairly often.

I don't entirely disagree with your assertion, especially in hospital billing, but you're aware of this thing called inflation right? A 1975 dollar has the buying power of $4.55 today (according to the dollartimes inflation calculator).

My copays are $25 for a general visit. So, let's go with your assertion that $25 is what you paid for a full office visit in 1975 (I wasn't alive then, but I'll trust you), and convert that to today's dollar. That's $113.75, which is actually LESS than my insurance provider allows for a general office visit for in network doctors - I think it's about $95 if I remember my EOB the last time I checked.

I did this with a gen doctor visit because my standard Dentist cleaning visits are $80 (without insurance - xrays are additional though, did they do those in 1975 once a year?), so that's an even bigger discrepancy in 1975 vs. 2016 buying power.

You have no clue what Advance Care Planning is, do you? This is mostly about creating an Advanced Directive so hospitals, doctors and your families know what your wishes are should you be in the unfortunate condition of not being able to make medical decisions for yourself due to an illness or accident. This is about laying out your desires to let them go to extreme measures to revive you (the default case) or if you choose letting yourself to pass so you're not laying around braindead and force the decision of what to do with you on your loved ones. Those are both extreme cases on the care spectrum and care planning involves much more than just this.

The reason it was written into the ACA is because you really do need a doctor to go over what can happen with you medically and what an Advanced Directive covers. Doctor's time is money and very few people are doing them, even though it really is a pretty important document to make for yourself, so the proposal in the ACA was to force reimbursement of that time by insurance to allow more people to fill out advanced directives. This is a good thing.

BTW...your first fortune link labels the "Death Panels" comment by Palin the biggest lie of the year. The second latimes link indicates the Death Panels comment was "universally discredited". In short, you are a moron and have been hoisted by your own petard.

Oh really..I suppose the liberal media just staged this whole event then?

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/09/...